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How We Got Into It and What It Will Take To Get Out
In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s, showing how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care. As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to that debate.
Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America
How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman's childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.
How Fat Works is a concise and up-to-date primer on the workings of fat. It is essential reading for professionals entering careers in medicine and public health administration or anyone wanting a better understanding of one of our most urgent health crises.
Neural and Genetic Mechanisms
In Brain Arousal and Information Theory, Donald Pfaff presents a daring perspective on the long-standing puzzle of what arousal is. Pfaff argues that, beneath our mental functions and emotional dispositions, a primitive neuronal system governs arousal. Employing the simple but powerful framework of information theory, Pfaff revolutionizes our understanding of arousal systems in the brain.
Neural Mechanisms of Somatic Sensation
Vernon Mountcastle has devoted his career to studying the neurophysiology of sensation in the hand. In The Sensory Hand he provides an astonishingly comprehensive account of the neural underpinnings of the rich and complex tactile experiences evoked by stimulation of the hand. His new book thus becomes a sequel to his earlier volume, Perceptual Neuroscience, in which he offered a detailed analysis of the role of the distributed systems of the neocortex in perception generally.
China, Healing, and the West to 1848
When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people might point to the "rediscovery" of Chinese acupuncture in the 1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts, Linda Barnes leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese understandings of illness and healing.
Cross-sectional Atlas of the Brain provides a set of high-resolution color cross-sections of the human brain (six times higher than that of the only complete data set available to date), and each image is accompanied by state-of-the-art MRI and CT scans of the same specimen. The more than two hundred detailed and fully annotated images in this atlas provide a complete body of reference to the gross anatomy of the brain. The accompanying line drawings of these images provide a roadmap for easy orientation, and the unparalleled resolution of the images makes it possible to derive cross-sections of the same specimen in all standard orientations.
Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal
One of Us views conjoined twinning and other "abnormalities" from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics. This deeply thought-provoking and compassionate work exposes the extent of the social frame upon which we construct the "normal."
new in paperback
Living with Antidepressants
In this book, David Karp explores the relationship between pills and personhood by listening to a group of experts who rarely get the chance to speak on the matter--those who are taking the medications. Through their honest and vivid stories, this book provides unflinching portraits of people attempting to make sense of a process far more complex and mysterious than doctors or pharmaceutical companies generally admit.
Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South
Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations in the antebellum South, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. This is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.